Everybody really does poop, no matter what their species is. Well, except for the plant people. They just outgas a lot of oxygen and water vapor.
Surprisingly, she didn’t seem particularly grateful.
After a few diar, she was a little more functional. I had used the time to up my guard and create various precautions, and I’d figured out how to use her bolt prod. It wasn’t biometrically coded to her, which was a—pardon me, ha ha—shocking oversight.
I hung it on my own belt. I could almost hear the scraping of her eyes in their sockets as she followed it around with her gaze, thinking about how to get control of it and the situation. I may have neglected to mention in there anywhere that while she was unconscious I’d built a lock for it that I coded to my own pheromones and DNA signature.
I’d also been continuing to try to meditate my way into the ship’s control systems. Now that I had the run of the place, I’d used it, and I’d determined that there was nothing of the sort that we human types would consider a bridge, or a control room. Apparently the blasted Koregoi just navigated their ships by Zen. Or maybe turned them over to shipminds, vast and curious, but if that was the case then it seemed really likely that any shipmind once inhabiting this vessel was long corrupted, quiescent, or purged.
I still had time to come up with some kind of solution to the Kidnapped By Pirates problem, if I thought fast. And I still didn’t have any books. I could access Farweather’s stuff, because Freeporters didn’t run to foxes and senso, so all her VR was in an external. But Farweather’s taste in entertainment leaned to the kind of immersive sandbox VR exploration games with a lot of gun-or swordplay that left me cold. Connla had been a fan of that sort of thing, and even more so of large-scale military tactics simulators. Maybe he should have been the sole survivor. He’d have been less bored.
I pulled Farweather’s compact VR rig off my head, tossed it in a corner, and walked away while she yelled at me about how I was treating her stuff with disrespect and I hadn’t even asked her if I could use it.
Honestly, that was probably the closest she came to dying that whole trip, and I’m pretty sure she never even knew.
? ? ?
I waited until my hands organically stopped shaking with fury before I came back, walking and walking in random loops through the ship because I was, frankly, too attached to my atavistic barbarian rage to tune it down. I hadn’t disassembled Farweather’s perimeter, in case I needed it myself later to repel boarders, but I had opened it up, and I walked for the better part of a standard hour before I stopped fuming enough to trust myself, and to want to not be angry.
I made myself safe and headed back to our little base camp. Farweather was where I’d left her, chained to a stanchion that I’d managed to coax the Koregoi ship to grow by meditating at it. It hadn’t grown me the chains, and anyway I was hesitant, because Farweather could probably unwitch anything I could witch together that way. Instead, I’d used chains I’d welded up myself out of her own oxygen tanks.
Technically speaking, I hadn’t had to do it. There had been a set of restraints in her gear, probably intended for me, if she caught me. But I wasn’t going to use those on her: there was too much chance she had some sort of biocode on them that would allow her to override the locks.
Thus: the spare ox tanks. If we had to do any spacewalking, well. Zanya Farweather was shit out of luck.
Her own fault, really.
? ? ?
When I got back within sight of her, I stopped and folded my arms, leaning against the corridor wall at a cockeyed angle to her until she noticed I was there and shuffled around awkwardly to face me. The shimmer of copper-gold stardust in tendrils across her features had at some point stopped being unnerving, I noticed from the distance of my rage. Now it was just part of her face.
The only human face I’d seen in standard weeks. Because human brains are weird, I felt a little bit of affection for her at that moment. Disfigured like me; infested, like me. We were poisoned together.
I loathed her and I despised her and I thought I probably would have completely lost touch with myself by now if she had not been there. And somewhere on my long, furious walk, I had figured out what I needed to do, I thought, to try to get her to give me what I needed.
Well, if I didn’t have anything else to keep myself occupied with, I supposed there were worse hobbies than conversational salons with monsters. Even if I couldn’t think of any right now.
I was going to need all the supportive brain chemicals and electrical tuning that I could get.
? ? ?
Farweather watched me carefully as I walked over and sat down. Not next to her; I wasn’t stupid. But across the corridor against the wall, and diagonally a meter away or so. Where she could see me comfortably, but not under any circumstances reach. I had a flask of carbonated water in my hand, and I sipped it, considering her.
She studied me right back. “Ooo, something pissed off the good little clade girl.”
She was lucky I was tuned. I gave myself an extra bump of GABA and took three deep breaths anyway.
I drank more water and didn’t answer.
“Are you enjoying being angry?” she asked me, cocking her head. Her hair had gotten long, and she tossed it out of her eyes. The tape residue was slowly wearing off her uninjured wrist, but the chain connecting her feet to her hands was short enough that she still could only reach her face if she was sitting or crouched down.
She was trying to get my goat. Okay then. Apparently my letting my tuning slip a little had made her think that she could gain an advantage over me by continuing to push that.
Well, that was my tactic too, then. It was like wrestling: one of us would eventually get the upper hand, but we both had to offer openings to encourage the other to grapple, or we’d just wind up circling each other forever. And when it came to self-control, I had the advantage of my rightminding.
How could I lose?
I stretched my legs out more comfortably. “What if I turned you over to the Jothari?”
Her eyes narrowed a little. Where did you learn that name? But she didn’t say it—didn’t say anything, just frowned, by which I presumed she was thinking.
I decided to make her think harder. “I admit, I wondered how a human managed to get onto the crew of such a famously xenophobic species.”
“The Synarche left them with good reasons to hate it,” she said. “That’s not xenophobia.”
“Still.”
She shrugged, chain rattling. “Lots of people don’t like the Synarche. You’d be amazed at what you can come up to talk about with somebody when you discover you’ve got an enemy in common.”
“Well.” I sighed, and as if discovering that I had a sudden taste for it, got slowly to my feet to collect the coffee makings. “You’re a Jothari mass murderer, Zanya. Are you telling me that an extralegal species that murders and disassembles sentients for profit wouldn’t have a nice, rich price on the head of a treacherous alien crew member?”
“You’d have to find them,” she scoffed.
I shrugged. “I bet if I put the word out they’d find me.”
“Ativahikas have never been proved to be sentient,” she said, which was as nice an avoidance of a subject as I’d ever seen.
I gave her my second-best pitying look. She couldn’t have the best one, because I had honed it on Connla. “Whatever lets you sleep at night.”
“I sleep fine at night,” she spat back. “And I don’t need to get my brain fiddled to do it.”
The rich smell of the brewing coffee arose around the probe. I saw her lean back and close her eyes, inhaling deeply.
“You want some of this?”
She cracked an eye. “You know I do.”
It did smell amazing. It occurred to me that if I could get her to start cooperating in small things, and reward that cooperation, then eventually I’d find it easier to get her to cooperate in larger things as well. Just like training a cat.
Unrightminded humans basically weren’t that different from cats, were they?
Right? Maybe?
Maybe, in fact, I could get a psychological dependency going, and then she’d want to tell me what I needed to know: how to turn this Well-caught ship around.
It was probably my best chance of spending my retirement someplace more interesting than interment in a Freeport. And now that the options were a little clearer in my mind, it turned out that I would really much rather accept some semivoluntary service to the Synarche for a few ans, rather than be press-ganged by pirates who probably wanted me more for the stuff in my skin than my engineering skill anyway. I couldn’t imagine myself very happy with a life of using my alien parasite to hunt down and raid unsuspecting ships and their crews.